Telecommunication companies frequently sell access to physical network telephony communication infrastructure and to telephony services related to the efficient use of such infrastructure. In offering services, the telecommunication companies have increasingly allowed individuals outside their corporate boundaries with options for customizing, restricting, and provisioning the services. An increasing number of companies are entering the telephony service bureau market to sell services by leasing "space" on network infrastructures from network operators. This service market treats physical telephony networks as a commodity which the service bureaus lease from network providers. Service bureaus acquire service technology to solve business telephony needs and then resell access to the technology solution to other telecommunication providers.
One example of a service typically sold by a service bureau is a toll free "800" number such as, for instance, the toll free number frequently used by mail order businesses that sell consumer goods. A consumer can order goods from a mail order company by dialing one toll free number. The consumer's call is routed to a central processor, such as a service control point. The central processor associates the 800 number dialed by the consumer with the physical location of the mail order company on the network and provides a number for that location to a switch, which routes the consumer's call to that physical location.
Presently, a service subscriber like the mail order company described above, must rely on a service operator to set up and provide the toll free service. The service operator must coordinate with the network operator to provision the service to the central processors on the network. However, creating and provisioning a service on a network can involve complicated software programming and development. Small changes to the service can require extensive programming to enable service logic features and rules on the central processor. This programming is generally accomplished in object oriented C++ software language, and can take six to nine months from the beginning of development until deployment is accomplished on a given network.
Another difficulty related to the creation and provisioning of a service is the service's interaction with the telephony database of the network operator. A single service may have to extract and use data fields from as many as fifteen to twenty separate tables of the telephony database. Network operators have accumulated these databases over time without necessarily intending to make these databases available to third parties such as service operators and service subscribers. Accordingly, these databases may be arranged in non-user friendly formats which require extensive training to understand and use.
For instance, in a typical database, one table can contain a customer's name, telephone number and billing information in separate entry fields in which each field is identified by a unique acronym label. A separate table can contain telephone numbers with each telephone number having associated data identifying particular options associated with the telephone number, such as call waiting or call forwarding, again with each field identified by a unique acronym label. A data entry operator would have to know how to access and understand each table and each acronym in a database to provide assistance to a service subscriber seeking, for instance, to have a call waiting service enabled for his telephone number. Further, the data entry operator would have complete access to the database, including access to sensitive data, such as credit information, even though the data entry operator has no need for access to this sensitive information to enable the service.